On Television
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff A Misguided Love Affair IN A society increasingly professionalized, there is a certain coarse verisimilitude in TV's almost morbid preoccupation with the...
...There is so much nobility in Jefferson High it makes one wince...
...The first episode dealt with a call-girl, Layna Harris, who adroitly keeps her professional life at arm's distance from her young child...
...In some ways, particularly in its brooding concern about the poor and the dispossessed, it suggests Naked City at its best...
...Your dirt is everywhere —the killer of the dream," he snarls as he lunges...
...There are the same peeling tenement flats, the bedraggled people sitting on stoops, the choking passions of the inarticulate...
...As part of his therapy, he works as a volunteer in the social service office...
...In this little fable, Mr...
...Novak is strong medicine, but I doubt that it cures...
...Layna loses the baby by court order, though there is still a glimmer of a chance that she might redeem herself...
...Novak, they fight to stay in teaching...
...You make us learn, and that's why we're here...
...In the meantime, he is shamelessly neglecting John Greenleaf Whittier...
...Where did they ever dredge up those antediluvian lessons...
...There is some interesting interplay between Brock (George Scott) and a female associate—Brock displaying a man's tolerance for prostitutes, the woman regarding her as an untouchable...
...In the end, Novak, a grim stalker, once again catches his antagonist with the goods...
...If such programs do not have a solid documentary flavor, then what are they...
...In an episode I recently watched, "I Don't Even Live Here," this pro-teacher militancy takes a nasty turn...
...the father skidded out of town when responsibilities loomed up before him...
...Otis, it appears, has been dumped by school after school, but he cannot bear to be sundered from teaching...
...Notably absent in Mr...
...And Brock behaves more like a Clifford Odets character in the throes than a highly trained professional...
...Equally gratifying was the admirable restraint and sober honesty in the portrayal of social workers—no gunplay, no violence, and, thank heavens, no instant therapy...
...Whittier, indeed...
...A fearful fraud, he uses humor as a way of defending himself...
...The child's paternal grandmother has charged the young woman with being unfit to raise the baby...
...This is straight stuff...
...The child, by the way, is illegitimate...
...There is one thoroughly implausible scene in which Novak, the blond, handsome Gletkin of Jefferson High, accuses Otis of academic delinquency in the presence of dozens of children...
...That isn't at all the way I remember it...
...Chastened but determined, Otis returns to prepositions, conjunctions, and John Greenleaf Whittier—and no jokes if you please...
...If he was vaguely epicene in the past, he is now redoubtably masculine, dazzlingly good-looking...
...When I first walked in," he explains whimperingly, "the bombs were all around me, so I built myself a bomb shelter...
...At this point, the whole shabby story spills out...
...Eagle Scout Novak answers in his manly, forthright way: "I can't give you a place to hide, but I can give you a place to go—your classroom...
...Otis tries to bully and cajole Novak, but in vain...
...Charming, the college series, has proved to be something of a hoax —any resemblance to higher education is virtually accidental...
...If you teach them something along the way, that's fine...
...ON TELEVISION By David Boroff A Misguided Love Affair IN A society increasingly professionalized, there is a certain coarse verisimilitude in TV's almost morbid preoccupation with the professions...
...Otis remains at Jefferson High—on trial—and it is obvious that he had better watch out for FBI man Novak...
...If TV is prepared to take an honest, searching look at the professions, that's one thing...
...Responding with panic, she turns up drunk at her apartment with a slob of a John at precisely the moment that Brock and his supervisor come to visit...
...Certainly, using a self-proclaimed misanthrope, only a hairbreadth away from psychosis, as an office assistant in a social work agency seems woefully unprofessional to me...
...The episode ends on a note of muted hopefulness...
...And then there are all the fascinating complexities of how things get done slowly, painstakingly...
...It dealt with a recluse—a devotee of Voltaire and Schopenhauer, no less— whom Brock lures into giving up his 10-year seclusion...
...One wonders whether television's love affair with the professions really makes sense...
...If his morale, in the common view, was shaky, if he suffered from self-doubt, he is now (as played by James Franciscus) stridently upbeat, ferociously committed, the very picture of the new executive-educator glowing with Teachers College affirmations, the man most likely to be school superintendent by age 35...
...Jack Gould of the New York Times reports that some social workers have complained about the distorted portrayal of their profession...
...The Principal (Dean Jagger), yet another wise elder, is all gentle solicitude and mental hygiene platitude ("I think as you grow older you will discover that everyone has a little insecurity in him...
...The first program actually suggested that most things require a long, hard pull...
...There is, in fact, a rather unamiable moralism about this installment—the second in the series —that runs counter to the usual tryto-understand-the-other-fellow ethos which usually prevails on the air waves...
...Well they might...
...When he sits in on that teacher's current class, he discovers that Otis is a kibitzer, a buffoon, and the kids love it...
...In addition to the palpably dramatic callings of doctor, lawyer, nurse, this new season has witnessed the emergence of college professor, social worker, and highschool teacher as standard fare...
...Novak— the Billy Budd of teachers—takes over an honor English class and is pained to discover that the children are not doing as well with him as they did with his predecessor, Mr...
...One thing the NEA evidently failed to advise about is curriculum...
...But you're not," he tells boring old Novak...
...The case is under study, but at this time Layna's neighbors begin to gang up on her...
...but to use them merely as a springboard for hysteria, that's quite another...
...And Otis is stampeded into dishonesty only by his frantic desire to remain a teacher ("If teaching is a part of us, then isn't losing it some kind of death...
...There are problems aplenty in social work—the tug of war with phychiatrists, the chronic battle with city officials and philanthropists, the poignant issue of status, especially for the men (to be kind and helpful, except for physicians, is unmanly in our culture...
...There he encounters a wistful young wife, appealingly played by Janet Margolin, who is abused by her self-pitying lout of a husband...
...Novak has the grim earnestness of a West Point cadet...
...Otis has been bribing his classes by feeding them exam questions...
...If in the old view, high-school teachers —men particularly—daydreamed about getting into something else, in Mr...
...And there is a revealing little moment at the high-school dance when one teacher says to another, as they watch the young barbarians in their revels: "I think they call it Mashed Potatoes...
...The catch, of course, is that the lovable Mr...
...Novak, on the other hand, plunges manfully into prepositions and conjunctions with his less titillated pupils...
...In a climactic scene, all the recluse's anger is directed against the young husband...
...Novak is determined to upend all the old stereotypes about the male teacher...
...But the result of this coy hand-holding by Madison Avenue and Squaresville is a portrait of a high-school teacher which is curious, to say the least...
...But it is, it is...
...Otis...
...And the authenticity is heightened by Edward Adler's script (he is the taxidriver novelist), which is free from the pseudo-literary pyrotechnics of so much TV writing but is full of deft little touches (the Italian grandmother says wanly about Layna, as if this explains everything: "She's not Italian girl...
...IT was with a measure of disbelief that I saw the first installment of East Side/West Side (Monday-CBs), the new series about social workers...
...The next time I looked in on East Side /West Side it had all the familiar TV bluster...
...But as long as the producers of this show are committed to the idea of an emotional blockbuster every Monday night at 10, they're in trouble...
...Equally phony is the portrait of the children...
...Brock interrupts what would have been homicide...
...They are also practitioners of instant psychoanalysis...
...Does he have to be that good-looking...
...The grandmother has little urge to undertake the arduous chore of child-raising, while the young mother, hustler though she may be, is actually conscientious about her baby...
...Surely not literature...
...The portrayal of the high school is as phony as a school superintendent's annual report...
...It's no worse than the Big Apple," the other says reassuringly...
...But the dialectic between the baby's mother and grandmother is complicated...
...If you want to keep your anger, use it out there," he tells the recluse...
...He is afraid of us," a child says about Otis...
...Novak is that healthy, abrasive cynicism that enabled us to keep our sanity...
...My euphoria, however, was short-lived...
...Fun and games—that's what they want," Otis asserts...
...Novak, the new high-school series (Tuesday-NBC), turns up with impeccable credentials: the National Education Association, the Big Gun of teachers across the country, serves in an advisory capacity in the preparation of the series...
...Having done a few seasons of penal servitude as a high-school teacher myself (five nerve-wracking teaching periods a day, idiotic forms to fill out, and time clocks to punch), I was stunned to discover that the teachers in Jefferson High devote their free periods to sitting around the lounge and holding impromptu seminars on pedagogy...
...For one thing, it has George C. Scott in the lead role, and he gives the part a hard-bitten authority as he squints in helpless pain at all the misery out there...
Vol. 46 • October 1963 • No. 22
